Summary:
Entrepreneurship not only aids in employment and income growth for farmers but also plays a key role in promoting rural vitalization and assisting farmers and rural areas in achieving common prosperity. While the literature indicates that institutional factors have a significant impact on farmers' entrepreneurship, the specific influence of social credit remains relatively unexplored. In fact, social credit has always played an important role in the economy as an informal institution. Furthermore, with the advancement of information technology and the enhancement of government governance capabilities, social credit, as an informal institution, is undergoing a significant transformation. In 2014, the State Council issued the “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014-2020)”, formally incorporating the development of the social credit system into the government governance framework as a systematic project to comprehensively enhance national governance capabilities. In 2022, the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the General Office of the State Council published the “Opinions on Promoting the High-Quality Development of the Social Credit System to Form a New Development Pattern,” further advocating for the deep integration of credit concepts, credit systems, and credit tools with all aspects and links of the national economic system. The recent document indicates that by utilizing information technology to enhance government governance, the regulatory gap between the informal institution of social credit and formal institutions is gradually narrowing. What are the economic effects of this institutional transition, and how does it affect farmers' entrepreneurship？ Regrettably, these issues still lack sufficient scholarly attention. Based on data from the China Labor-Force Dynamics Survey, this paper examines the impact of the Construction of China's Social Credit System on farmers' entrepreneurship. It finds that due to information asymmetry, farmers in areas with poorer social credit generally have lower entrepreneurship rates and entrepreneurial status. The public disclosure of dishonesty information effectively alleviates credit information asymmetry, enhances social trust, increases farmers' opportunities to access informal financial resources through “weak ties,” and significantly promotes farmers' entrepreneurship. These positive effects are stronger in less developed regions, and their marginal impact on development-oriented entrepreneurship and the secondary/tertiary sector is pronounced. Further research indicates that compared with local rural farmers, migrant farmers from other regions are more susceptible to external credit conditions due to hukou factors and regional credit disparities. This paper's innovations and contributions can be summarized in four main aspects. First, this paper breaks the barrier in the literature between work that separately discusses how formal and informal institutions affect farmers' entrepreneurship. It systematically evaluates the economic effects of the transition from the informal institution of social credit to a formal one, offering a new perspective for future research. Second, this paper examines the mechanism of how the construction of a social credit system affects farmers' entrepreneurship from the perspective of the disclosure of dishonesty information, set against the backdrop of increasing rural “atomization” and increasing levels of informatization. It serves as a beneficial supplement to traditional theories on farmers' entrepreneurship. Third, differing from research focused on how social credit affects the efficiency of formal financial resource allocation, this paper finds that the construction of a social credit system also positively affects the efficiency of informal financial resource allocation, thus broadening research in the field of social credit. Fourth, this paper shows that social credit system construction, by establishing a credit information sharing mechanism, compensates for the diminishing “guanxi-based” information sharing mechanism in rural areas under increasing atomization. It effectively alleviates the informal financial resource constraints due to information asymmetry, and it promotes farmers' entrepreneurship. These findings offer new insights that improve the understanding of the effectiveness of social credit system construction and address the challenges of rural entrepreneurship in the new era. Based on the above conclusions, improving the social credit system, accelerating the construction of the rural credit system, improving rural inclusive finance, and thereby fully utilizing the complementary roles of informal and formal finance are important measures for promoting rural entrepreneurship and stimulating rural economic vitality.
潘妍, 余泳泽. 社会信用体系建设促进了农户创业吗？——基于失信信息公开视角[J]. 金融研究, 2023, 522(12): 169-187.
PAN Yan, YU Yongze. Can Social Credit System Construction Promote Farmers' Entrepreneurship？ Insights from the Perspective of Dishonest Information Disclosure. Journal of Financial Research, 2023, 522(12): 169-187.
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